Feeding Three Stray Cats

Excerpted from Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, ©1997:

The tailor does not wear glasses and his stitches could be done by mice.  In his desk shop with the sewing machine by the window and the spools lined up on the sill, I see a new white bicycle, a water bottle attached for long trips, nifty leather saddlebags over the back wheel.  When I see him later, though, he is only in the town park, feeding three stray cats food from his saddlebags.  He unwraps the scraps they are so clearly expecting.  He and I are the only ones out on Sunday morning, when most people who live here are doing something else.  When I gave him my pants to hem last week, he showed me a circle of photos tacked up on the back wall.  His young wife with parted lips and wavy, parted hair.  Morta.  His mother like an apple doll, also dead.  His sister.  There was one of him, too, as a young soldier for the Pope, restored to youth, with black hair, his legs apart and shoulders back.  He was twenty-five in Rome, the war just ended.  Now fifty more years later have passed, everyone gone.  He pats the white bicycle.  I never thought I'd be the one left.

I had almost given up on this book.  I was nearly half way through, and to that point it had only been about rich people buying themselves nice things and cooking themselves gourmet meals.

Then it got better.